争取自由民主中国

Notes on the China I’m Leaving Behind

By ANDREW JACOBSBEIJING — I GOT together at a restaurant the other night with some Chinese and expatriate friends. While bossa nova played in the background, we sipped French merlot and snapped iPhone photos of one another making goofy faces.

Observed from afar, the gathering suggested just how cosmopolitan Beijing has become in recent years, buoyed by three decades of nonstop economic growth and a sense that China has finally arrived as a global power.

从远处看，这场聚会完全表现出，在经历三十年不间断的经济增长后，在中国终于成为大国的心态带动下，近年来北京已经变得多么国际化。

But anyone eavesdropping on the conversations that evening would have been struck by the angst and trepidation expressed by my friends, who were marking my departure after I’d spent nearly eight years here.

They included a soft-spoken Tibetan writer who cannot obtain a passport to travel abroad, a painter whose entire body of work was confiscated by the police last year and a small-business owner and single mother who reluctantly sent her adolescent son to study in the United States “rather than have his mind brainwashed by the Chinese education system.”

At the other end of the table, an editor at a state-run news service griped about the unceasing demands of propaganda officials intent on shaping the minds of 1.3 billion people. “We are a generation without hope,” the editor, who is 32, later said, explaining why he was considering trading his well-paying job for an uncertain future in Thailand. “Everyone I know is adrift, even fearful about what tomorrow might bring.”

As I faced the end of my time in China, I realized just how much — and how little — had changed since my first visit here in 1985. In those days, the wounds of Mao’s Cultural Revolution were still raw, but hopes for a better future were palpable on the streets of the sleepy capital, a low-rise tangle of hutongs, or narrow alleys, that were little changed since the 13th century.

By the time I returned in 2008, a few months before the start of the Beijing Summer Olympics, the city had been transformed, many of the hutongs replaced by Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas-designed high-rises and a world-class subway system that was adding a new line every year.

Beijing was awash with Italian sports cars, luxury handbag boutiques and a belief that China was finally commanding the respect it had been denied during its decades as an impoverished backwater.

北京到处是意大利跑车和奢侈品牌手提包精品店。人们普遍认为，中国终于获得了过去几十年作为一个贫穷落后的国家所得不到的尊重。

For Chinese intellectuals, there was tentative optimism that the constraints imposed by the Communist Party might finally be eased. Much of that hope was pinned to the Internet. Hopes soared when the government pledged to unblock previously banned websites during the Games and said it would allow demonstrations in official “protest zones.”

Those promises turned out to be hollow. The protest zones stayed empty (those who applied for permission to protest were detained) and only foreign reporters working at the Olympic Village enjoyed unfettered access to the web.

但后来，那些承诺证明是空话。示威区空无一人（申请抗议许可的人遭到拘捕），只有在奥运村工作的外国记者可以享用没有限制的网络。

Looking back, the Olympics were the beginning of a new era for China: that of an increasingly powerful and self-confident nation but one whose leaders fear their own citizens and one that has committed itself to constraining their thoughts and aspirations.

Instead of revolutionizing society, the web has become a sophisticated tool for contorting the minds of China’s 650 million Internet users. Within months of the Olympics closing ceremony, the government moved to block Facebook, Twitter and YouTube; before long, the list of banned websites would grow to include The New York Times, Bloomberg, Instagram, Dropbox and Google’s services.

In their place, Beijing has promoted domestic offerings like Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like service, the messaging app WeChat and news portals like Sohu — all of them strictly policed for content deemed threatening to the party’s hold on power. Try typing in “Tiananmen Square massacre” and the dominant Chinese search engine Baidu will spit back a screen announcing that the results “are not available according to certain laws and policies.”

The impact of this online manipulation has been sobering. Most young Chinese cannot identify the iconic photo of the lone protester who stood in front of a tank that spring in 1989, and last year, when thousands of students took to the streets of Hong Kong demanding democracy, otherwise sensible friends could only parrot back the state media’s talking points: that the protesters were spoiled hooligans who had been manipulated by “hostile foreign forces.”

It’s true that China is far more open than it was 25 years ago. Chinese are traveling and studying abroad in ever greater numbers, and loosened social controls mean that Chinese and foreigners can mix without interference from the authorities. Despite the government’s best efforts, millions manage to circumvent online censorship by using VPN software.

But the party has nearly perfected the art of control, giving Chinese society a heady dynamism that often obscures the government’s far-reaching limits on dissent. These days, official slogans trumpet such ideals as “democracy” and “justice” but citizens are jailed for advocating free elections or for suing the government over polluting factories.

Journalists are supposed to remain emotionally detached from the people and news events we cover. But my objectivity was tested when police detained Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent human rights lawyer, who remains in police custody 18 months later, and Ilham Tohti, an ethnic Uighur academic who received a life sentence last year, ostensibly because he offered reporters a frank assessment of the government’s approach to unrest in the Xinjiang region in China’s far west. Both men were not just reliable sources but had become friends.

Since President Xi Jinping came to power three years ago, his promotion of the Chinese Dream — Equity! Fairness! Innovation! — has become a rallying cry for national rejuvenation. Its practical impact, however, has been to foment nationalist sentiment that often feels xenophobic. Journalists, academics and Buddhist monks are forced to attend political education classes, where they repeat bromides about the primacy of the Communist Party.

In a scene redolent of China’s Maoist past, some of the nation’s most celebrated actors and film directors have in recent weeks been publicly pledging to uphold “core socialist values,” part of a campaign to ensure that popular culture is a reliable vehicle for promoting the party’s interest.

Despite the recent economic slowdown, the streets of Beijing earlier this month were abuzz with shoppers and all the trappings of modern society. Mr. Xi’s administration has won the affections of many: He has made significant headway curbing the petty corruption that frustrated average Chinese and eased population controls that limited couples to a single child. Sleek high-speed trains connect many of the country’s largest cities, and owning a Buick sedan is now within reach of China’s burgeoning middle class.

At the same time, the Communist Party, largely through fear and intimidation, seems to have trained much of the population to channel their energies into the pursuit of consumerism.

与此同时，共产党似乎也成功地引导许多中国人将自己的精力投入到物质消费追求上。这在很大程度上是通过让他们担忧和恐惧的方式来实现的。

But the desire for a better tomorrow — for cleaner air, for justice, for a chance to pick their political leaders — cannot be entirely extinguished. A few days before I left, I stopped by my local bicycle repair shop, whose patriotic owner had always been quick to insult the Japanese or laud his country’s rising military might.

As I said my final goodbye, he made a joke about stowing away in my luggage. “But I thought you loved China,” I said, gesturing to the freshly paved road and the row of newly renovated storefronts that had been paid for by the government. “I do love my country,” he said, looking sheepishly at his feet. “But I love freedom even more.”